The original text of The Portrait of a Lady has what is arguably the most delicately understated ending in all Victorian fiction. Isabel has at last come to a true appreciation of her husband, Osmond, and sees a straight path in front of her. In full consciousness of his moral worthlessness, and the worthiness of her loyal suitor, Caspar Goodwood, she has made a decision. The reader is not directly informed what that decision is. Osmond is meanwhile in Italy, and Isabel has been staying in London with her friend, Henrietta:

Two days afterwards Caspar Goodwood knocked at the door of the house in Wimpole Street in which Henrietta Stackpole occupied furnished lodgings. He had hardly removed his hand from the knocker when the door was opened and Miss Stackpole herself stood before him. She had on her hat and jacket; she was on the point of going out. ‘Oh, good-morning,’ he said, ‘I was in hopes I should find Mrs Osmond.’

Henrietta kept him waiting a moment for her reply; but there was a good deal of expression about Miss Stackpole even when she was silent. ‘Pray what led you to suppose she was here?’

‘I went down to Gardencourt this morning, and the servant told me she had come to London. He believed she was to come to you.’

Again Miss Stackpole held him – with an intention of perfect kindness – in suspense. ‘She came here yesterday, and spent the night. But this morning she started for Rome.’

Caspar Goodwood was not looking at her; his eyes were fastened on the doorstep. ‘Oh, she started—?’ he stammered. And without finishing his phrase or looking up he stiffly averted himself. But he couldn’t otherwise move.

Henrietta had come out, closing the door behind her, and now she put out her hand and grasped his arm. ‘Look here, Mr Goodwood,’ she said; ‘just you wait!’

On which he looked up at her …

As originally published, the novel ends with Caspar’s perplexed gaze into Henrietta’s face – and very effective the ending is. Most readers assume that Isabel has of course gone back to Osmond. This is a willed, moral, unselfish, hugely courageous, ‘ladylike’ action. In her article ‘Two Problems in The Portrait of a Lady’, Dorothea Krook is contemptuous of any other construction which might be wished on to the end of James’s novel by weak-minded readers:

Interestingly, Krook does not even consider, among the absurd alternatives open to Isabel, the absurdest of all: adultery or ‘open sexual union’ with Caspar. Yet this is one of the possible interpretations of Henrietta’s ‘Just you wait!’ – that is, ‘don’t, worry, she’ll come back and then you two can get together at last’.

This may seem a far-fetched gloss to the last paragraphs of the 1881 The Portrait of a Lady. But this is precisely how the ending was misread in one of the most important reviews the novel received on its first appearance, that in the Spectator (unsigned, November 1881), by Richard Holt Hutton. ‘Never before’, Hutton thunderously declared in the peroration to his long piece, ‘has Mr James closed a novel by setting up quite so cynical a sign-post into the abyss, as he sets up at the close of this book’:

He ends his Portrait of a Lady, if we do not wholly misinterpret the rather covert, not to say almost cowardly, hints of his last page, by calmly indicating that this ideal lady of his, whose belief in purity has done so much to alienate her from her husband, in that it had made him smart under her contempt for his estimates of the world, saw a ‘straight path’ to a liaison with her rejected lover. And worse still, it is apparently intended that this is the course sanctioned both by her high-minded friend, Miss Stackpole, and by the dying cousin whose misfortune had been to endow her with wealth that proved fatal to her happiness.

Hutton delivered himself of much more in the same appalled vein, concluding with: ‘We can hardly speak too highly of the skill and genius shown in many parts of The Portrait of a Lady. We can hardly speak too depreciatingly of the painting of that portrait itself, or of the moral collapse into which the original of the portrait is made to fall.’2

For most modern readers, the idea that Isabel is intending an eventual extra-marital liaison (‘moral collapse’) is grotesque. Hutton clearly does ‘misinterpret’ the last page in the most disastrous way. Yet, just as clearly, James worried about this misinterpretation. If an intelligent reader and former of public opinion like Hutton could go wrong, so might multitudes of others, When he revised the novel, together with all his major fiction, in 1908, he added the following postscript to the 1881 ending:

No one reading this version of the text could fall into Hutton’s error. James here obliterates the remotest possibility that Isabel will ever throw in her lot with Goodwood. All that Henrietta means by her final instruction (‘just you wait!’) is that Caspar must be patient, and someone else will come into his life. He has many years ahead of him. It is hard not to feel that a fine Jamesian effect has been lost in order to achieve the corrective, unequivocal stress that the author felt was necessary.

Oddly enough, if Hutton were mounting the endings of major Victorian novels on his wall as trophies, The Portrait of a Lady would be joined by Middlemarch. The final two paragraphs of George Eliot’s ‘Study of Provincial Life’ are as famous as anything she wrote. Never did the author achieve a more resounding tone of moral authority as – Godlike – she pronounced on the human condition in the middle years of the nineteenth century. None the less, Eliot clearly had authorial doubts about her concluding remarks. As David Carroll reveals in his Oxford World’s Classics edition, not only did she have second thoughts while composing, she also made her most significant textual alterations in revised editions of Middlemarch to these last two paragraphs. Notably, she made a major excision in post-1874 versions of the novel (marked here by square brackets and italics):

Certainly those determining acts of [Dorothea’s] life were not ideally beautiful. They were the mixed result of a young and noble impulse struggling amidst the conditions of an imperfect social state, in which great feelings will often take the aspect of error, and great faith the aspect of illusion. [They were the mixed result of young and noble impulse struggling under prosaic conditions. Among the many remarks passed on her mistakes, it was never said in the neighbourhood of Middlemarch that such mistakes could not have happened if the society into which she was born had not smiled on propositions of marriage from a sickly man to a girl less than half his own age – on modes of education which make a woman’s knowledge another name for motley ignorance – on rules of conduct which are in flat contradiction with its own loudly-asserted beliefs. While this is the social air in which mortals begin to breathe, there will be collisions such as those in Dorothea’s life, in which great feelings will often take the aspect of error, and great faith the aspect of illusion.] For there is no creature whose inward being is so strong that it is not greatly determined by what lies outside it. A new Theresa will hardly have the opportunity of reforming a conventual life, any more than a new Antigone will spend her heroic piety in daring all for the sake of a brother’s burial: the medium in which their ardent deeds took shape is for ever gone. But we insignificant people with our daily words and acts are preparing the lives of many Dorotheas, some of which may present a far sadder sacrifice than that of the Dorothea whose story we know.

Her finely-touched spirit had still its fine issues, though they were not widely visible. Her full nature, like that river of which Cyrus broke the strength, spent itself in channels which had no great name on the earth. But the effect of her being on those around her was incalculably diffusive: for the growing good of the world is partly dependent on unhistoric acts; and that things are not so ill with you and me as they might have been, is half owing to the number who lived faithfully a hidden life, and rest in unvisited tombs.

As the editor of the Penguin Classics Middlemarch, Rosemary Ashton, records, Eliot made this substantial change ‘after recognizing that those critics [notably Richard Holt Hutton] were right who pointed out that Middlemarch society did not smile on Mr Casaubon’s proposal’. Hutton was thinking about such things as Mrs Cadwallader’s sarcasms in Chapter 6 about the ill-assorted marriage.

Hutton had reviewed the serial parts of Middlemarch as they came out, in the Spectator, of which he was literary editor. He also reviewed the whole novel when it was published entire in December 1872.4 He claimed to admire Eliot’s achievement intensely. But he had doubts about the last paragraphs. Robert Tener and Malcolm Woodfield sum up Hutton’s mixed feelings, and the seriousness with which Eliot took them:

As with The Portrait of a Lady’s Huttonian postscript, one may question whether the Huttonian excision from Middlemarch was artistically correct. It is true that Sir James Chettam and Mrs Cadwallader are scathing about an old stick like Casaubon (in his early forties) marrying a nineteen-year-old girl. Even Mr Brooke, in his ineffectual way, tries to dissuade his ward. But the fact is that Dorothea is two years short of the age of consent. Had Mr Brooke and her other guardians felt that strongly about the match, they could have forbidden it for 24 months with absolute authority and a clear conscience (Casaubon and Dorothea are the least likely people in all Victorian fiction to elope to Gretna Green). They (specifically Mr Brooke) consented to the match, even if ‘smiling on it’ may be slightly too strong a term. And why did they consent? Because Casaubon was a rich man. If he were a poor parson with just his living (that is, if his elder brother had not died, leaving him the wealthy heir of Lowick) there is no doubt but that Mr Brooke would have put his foot down very firmly. Eliot’s essential point remains valid and could easily have been covered by toning down ‘smiled on’ to ‘acquiesced in’.

There is another reason for regretting the excision. It is not just the one comment about sickly men marrying girls less than half their age which is removed. Eliot also took out the remark about ‘modes of education which make a woman’s knowledge another name for motley ignorance’. By removing this aggressive note of feminist protest, Eliot effectively depoliticized her ending. It represents a loss, since one of the sharpest themes in Middlemarch is that women’s education must be improved if English society is to get the best from its women. Not to make this point explicitly and with force is to muffle a conclusion which the novelist has worked hard for.

Finally, there is the rather mysterious remark which Eliot modified about great feelings ‘colliding’ with society’s ‘loudly-asserted beliefs’ about ‘rules of conduct’, thus presenting to crasser minds the aspect of error. I would guess that what Eliot is thinking about here is her own unsanctified union with G.H. Lewes. Technically, she and Lewes were living in sin. This is what small-minded contemporaries said about them and, as Gordon Haight records in his biography, ‘Mr and Mrs Lewes’ (as they liked to be known) encountered persistent social ostracism for their having sacrificed conventional decencies to their ‘great feelings’.6

In general, Hutton’s approach to narrative is one which will be congenial to many readers. He was a close and often bloody-minded scrutinizer of the text, forever looking for nooks and crannies into which to introduce a pedantic or a downright perverse interpretation. But I would suspect that George Eliot was not driven to make her massive (for such it is) change to the conclusion of Middlemarch merely because Hutton had perceived a slight contradiction between what was said in the penultimate paragraph and what had been said by some second-rank characters in Chapter 6. What alarmed her was the fact that someone as authoritative as the literary editor of the Spectator was looking so closely at the last sentences of her novel. So as not to confuse the moral peroration with secondary distractions, she purged her conclusion not just of its small narrative anomaly (which did not in fact require anything more than a change of phrase) but of its sexual politics and a significant measure of its personal import.

Both Eliot and James made the claim, common enough with great novelists, that the opinions of the critics meant nothing to them. But it is unarguable that in the above instances the reviewer’s opinions were not just registered, they were deferred to. Of the millions of twentieth-century readers who have read Middlemarch in its post-1874 version and The Portrait of a Lady in its post-1908 version, probably less than one in ten thousand could say who Richard Holt Hutton was. And yet, for all time, his messy fingerprints will be all over the conclusions to these novels.

Notes

1. Dorothea Krook, ‘Two Problems in The Portrait of a Lady’, in The Ordeal of Consciousness in Henry James (New York, 1962), 357.

2. The Hutton review is usefully reprinted in Roger Gard (ed.), Henry James: The Critical Heritage (London, 1968), 93–6.

3. See The Portrait of a Lady (Oxford World’s Classics edition), 628.

4. A selection from Hutton’s reviews of the serial and collected Middlemarch is given in David Carroll (ed.), George Eliot: The Critical Heritage (London, 1971), 286–313.

5. See Robert Tener and Malcolm Woodfield, A Victorian Spectator: The Uncollected Writings of R.H. Hutton (Bristol, 1990), 30.

6. See G.S. Haight, George Eliot: A Biography (London, 1968). A more hostile depiction of the social pressures on ‘Mr and Mrs Lewes’ is given by Marghanita Laski, George Eliot and her World (London, 1973), 98: ‘the Leweses, if they had not come to believe they were somehow or other married, at least began to forget they were not. In 1873, Lewes felt able to tell a correspondent that he had lived with his mother till he married his “Dorothea”.’